On Thursday, the genteel New York Times managing editor Marc Lacey and the company’s revered head labor attorney, Andrew Gutterman, met with representatives of the NewsGuild of New York, the paper’s main union, for the latest in an ongoing series of negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement. The talks are likely to continue up until a late February deadline, and perhaps beyond.

Negotiating with the union, of course, is one of the more lamentable responsibilities of Times leadership—a pastime that has, over the years, led to bad feeling and hostility. This was especially true after 2020, when the Covid–#MeToo–B.L.M. accountability vibe shift endowed an activist cohort with a fresh sense of moral authority and predilection for performative arts. In that heady period, it seemed as if the balance of power might really be shifting from the front office to the rank and file. After all, that was the year disgruntled Times employees effectively forced the defenestration of Opinion editor James Bennett via Slack. Back then, leaders had to at least pretend to entertain staff grievances, especially those pertaining to identity politics. Meanwhile, the pandemic inspired a thousand think pieces about a work-from-anywhere future, which conferred a new flexibility that many workers came to view as an absolute right. Emboldened, many labor organizers fought to defend this new dynamic and expand on it. This tension was acutely felt at the Times, which is both a digital growth darling and a bureaucratic institution that operates somewhere on the spectrum between the federal government and the Sarah Lawrence English department. And the guild, with its anachronistic hubris, doesn’t view its mandate as facilitating digital or business model transformation. Anyway, this recent meeting seemed to fit the traditional dialectic: Marc, a reliably conciliatory manager, subsequently sent out a memo in which he called the session “constructive—a spirited back and forth with an agreement to keep talking.” The guild seemed to see it differently. In its own postgame report, members said the Times leaders had “rejected every word of our priorities,” and accused management of “obfuscation,” “pettiness,” and pushing a “false narrative.” Part of the dissonance, alas, is the fact that the Times may have finally recovered much of the leverage on various critical topics, from A.I. profit-sharing to work-from-home policies. Most guild members I spoke to are primarily concerned with securing salary increases and improved benefits. Marc and fellow managing editor Carolyn Ryan came to the negotiations offering a 3 percent annual salary increase over the next three years, in line with the agreements with other Times guilds, including Wirecutter and Tech, and matching the increase for 2025. The guild appears to be content with that proposal for now. But just about every other item has been viewed as an affront. On health benefits, for instance, the guild is asking the company to contribute $16.7 million over the next two years—more than nine times the $1.8 million Times leadership has proposed. Beyond that, guild leadership has three sticking points of varying importance to the average member: They want the staff from The Athletic to join the guild rather than create their own union; they want to establish A.I.-related protections that would entitle their members to a cut of the Times A.I. licensing deals; and they want a far more generous return-to-office policy that would effectively allow them to work remotely for the majority of the year. All three of these points are nonstarters for the Times front office, which likely explains why they returned the guild’s proposal with entire sections redlined out.

Indeed, the vibes have re-shifted considerably since Covid. Corporate leaders, who reinstated five-day R.T.O. policies and quietly abandoned D.E.I. initiatives, also had the epiphany that they could run their companies without humoring the people on their payroll. This reversion has hit some newsrooms particularly hard. Journalists who saw their jobs as birthrights that could be performed on a flexible schedule from an undisclosed location are now being reacquainted with reality. Change agents like Emma Tucker at The Wall Street Journal, Will Lewis at The Washington Post, and Bari Weiss at CBS News have elegantly, or inelegantly, shown this cohort the door.

Understandably, Times leadership seems more self-assured than in previous negotiations, and less concerned about any impending public pressure campaigns and antics from persnickety employees—many of whom view their affiliation with the organization as both a badge of honor and a raft amid a hopeless industry. But the rubber will hit the road over one very contentious issue: remote work. The Times currently requires employees not on assignment to work from the office four days a week, and allows them to work remotely for three weeks out of the year. The guild has proposed a policy that would require employees to come into the office two days a week, with an allowance for eight weeks of remote work per year. That would roughly translate to employees being able to spend around two-thirds of the year out of office. In many ways, the impending standoff over remote work could serve as a litmus test for the new balance of power in news media writ large. Much of corporate America—Amazon, J.P. Morgan, Paramount, Meta, etcetera—has already instituted a five-day R.T.O. policy, seeing it as essential to performance and productivity. Guild members I spoke to said that the Times’s move to a four-day policy went off like a bomb, and became a point of contention for many employees—especially those with younger kids—who then became further incentivized to support the union’s ambitious proposal. They argue there is no data-driven argument for the R.T.O. policy, and suspect that Times executive editor Joe Kahn simply wants to be able to come into a populated office and feel like a boss. (Or, more cynically, eliminate extraneous employees who can’t meet the threshold.) In any case, the current deadline for negotiations is February 28, when the current contract expires. The Times and the NewsGuild have two more meetings scheduled between now and then, though Marc and Carolyn have proposed 11 additional dates. Despite their conciliatory natures, they likely know that this will get uglier before it gets resolved. Ostensibly, the people managing the most influential newspaper in the country, if not the world, have more important things to do with their time. Unfortunately, even in 2026, it’s an inescapable part of the job.